Saturday, July 7

The Swimming Teacher

It was around six o’clock and there was a dark furl of cloud hanging over the brown-hilled horizon. The car swept right then left and then we were pulling up on small stones in front an empty, red and white-striped guardpost with the barrier down. Up on the slope half a dozen gers, seeming to dirty in the gloom, stood separately from a tumble of small, workman-like buildings that looked like train carriages. There was a bulldozer. The wind was blowing now and Tulga closed the air vent and the roof on the jeep. A couple of hundred yards away, two figures were walking from the buildings down towards us. Through the windscreen there was nothing but an endless valley and evening coming. We got out to greet them, cigarettes at the ready, as they came past the barrier. One was a huge man, doughy and fat, eyes bunched and wearing blue pyjama bottoms that flipflapped non-stop in the gusts that came flying up the long incline. He turned to walk away almost as soon as he and the smaller man, wearing blue dark glasses and combat fatigues, reached us. They had made a silent, combined decision that we were no threat. The big man took a cigarette and headed back into the silent gold mine. The smaller man had a Russian pistol on his hip, the holster unbuttoned. He said his name was Batar and that he was the main guard at Tsaagan Tsagir, a joint Mongolian-Chinese mine that had been shut down a year ago because it had been caught using mercury and cyanide to gather the gold. Some goats downstream had died. Now there were ten guards who did one-month stints at the site, protecting the mine and the equipment, but he stayed here all the time. He had been there a year and did not know whether there were plans to re-open it. “The directors don’t tell us anything,” he said. As we talked, we stepped around the jeep, looking for shelter from the turning wind and the dust that flew to your throat from a heap of white, ground-out remains from the mine. Tsaagan Tsagir means white rock. How did he pass the time? He smiled and said he was used to it. He walked around, read newspapers. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s a job.” And then he said that before he was a guard with a cap and a gun, he had been a physical education teacher. He stepped back, into the wind, into the rising dust and mimed backstroke for a few seconds, laughing. “Swimming teacher,” he said. “Maybe when this is over I will be a swimming teacher again.”

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